In this video I talk about and then demonstrate in-game some of the new particle systems and textures in the works for Black Sun: Retribution. For the first time since the project began tentative beginnings in early 2012 the public will see some of the new work in motion. Those with close eyes may catch sight of some new ships.

The winds of change ebb and flow, and the stars weep their last breaths of life unto the ages. Time marches ever slower, but marches yet, as does the thunder of resolve.

Project Retribution creaks to life once more, with a half-dozen more Anahn ships reaching functional or nearing functional stages. Soon I will split the Royal and Warlord build trees entirely, one step amongst many to bring the Anahn second and third gen material to alpha stages. The Undead are nearly finished entirely, with only the Undead Myrookk needing work to finish their side of the project.

Meanwhile, many DyiithJhinn and Xy`Kranasha ships await to be started, and the entire UDK portion of the project inches closer with every motion.

I am conducting research into FumeFX once again, the plugin used by blizzard and co for their default settings gasoline explosions in ultralisks from siege tanks, and BSG for its ship explosions and, most importantly, I believe it was used in the Yamato movie for one of the very large explosions. This latter example has been my goal to replicate, more or less in a smaller, anime-style version.

The goal is to build animated texture sheets out of the resulting frames, and use these within both sins and the UDK.

For only a day or so total of work, my results so far have been promising. Only time will tell if I am able to figure out the specifics enough to create exactly what I want, or if the resulting effects will look any good in sins and co.

More importantly, I've decided to reserve the Retribution-era sound library only for developers who assisted the project. Of the original Black Sun library, only 1-2 people ever made note having used it. Since the Ret library will be an enormous and extremely valuable resource, it should be reserved for those who were actually a part of the project/community behind it.

Additionally, I am second guessing if I want to continue creating the developer series. According to youtube, over 155 views resulted in only a single complete video of the original Making Of video, which was only around 3-4 hours. The effort into making a full developer series is far from trivial, and I feel it will be a complete waste of my time to pursue it at this rate.

Projections for development have been updated to reflect more current timeline estimations. The Sins portion alone will probably take all of 2013 to finish completely, and the UDK will likely need most or all of 2014 on its own. Due to extreme complications in producing very simple internal videos (due to the massive instability of Vegas), the composition phase is also likely to be a massive logistical clusterfuck.